Archive / Month / November, 2006

ANTWERP

2006.11.29 @ 17:09

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I’ve finished putting up pics on my flickr from Antwerp and the HISK, where Bassam and I gave our short 3D course. Unfortunately after going through the films in more detail, it seems that only a couple of my Blender Conference photos came out :( Serves me right for using dodgy old expired film and a half-working flash.

CITY

2006.11.24 @ 06:58

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I got a bunch of films back today, with pics from Europe, Tokyo on the way home, and some assorted other things waiting to be developed. I’ll upload my few pics of the Blender conf and the HISK soon, but for now here’s just a handful from a while ago, out around the city with Kat while she was doing some exercises for class. Hers are much better though.

SPHERE

2006.11.22 @ 18:17

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Yesterday I found out about a new website called CGSphere. The premise is simple, take a sphere on a grid background in a CG application and interpret it in some creative way. It reminds me of one of my uni projects called small square book, in which we had to make a square book with 50 pages, with each page having a different image based on the idea of a square, linked together in some consistent theme. I really enjoyed that project, and the fun of trying to be inventive within limitations, so I posted my first CGSphere today.

It’s an homage to El Lissitzky, one of the Russian Suprematists / Constructivists, and his famous image Beat the Whites with Red Wedge from 1919. I really love that kind of art, and luckily had the chance to see some of the originals by Malevich, Lissitzky and Rodchenko in the Russian museum a few years ago. Anyway, this is just my small tribute :)

Update: I made another one.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

2006.11.16 @ 07:01

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Unless I’m mistaken and you, my readers, are extremely interested in selling me viagra and car insurance, I’ve been suffering from an increasingly bad blog comment spam problem, and it’s been getting a lot worse lately. Most of this is due to being stuck on an old version of Movable Type, which has very poor spam prevention. I’d been planning for a while to move over to Wordpress, which I like a lot more and have set up many times before (including on elephantsdream.org) but had been procrastinating for a while, worried about the changeover process.

Today, I finally cracked and exported this blog over to the new system, which went surprisingly smoothly. Most of the work took very little time at all, while tweaking the template to get it working just right took a little bit longer. Luckily Wordpress isn’t written in Perl, like Movable Type is, so when I ran into a limitation in the templating system, I could actually understand it enough to hack together a simple plugin to do the job. Hopefully everything should be working smoothly and you won’t even notice a difference, though I’m still working on a solution to keep old links pointing to the right pages. If you notice something that’s obviously messed up, please let me know! cheers.

WHIRLWIND MINUS THE TOUR

2006.11.03 @ 00:36

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I’m back in Sydney again, after arriving yesterday with surprisingly little jetlag. Previous times I’d been to Europe, I’d been a total zombie for the week after, but I suppose thanks to a fortuitous combination of travel times and aeroplane seating arrangements, I’m feeling pretty good. My time away was rushed and brief, but still very interesting.

After only arriving in Europe the night before, Blender conference came and went very quickly, it was great to catch up again, with the general Blender crew and of course the others from the Orange team (except for poor Basse, who was stranded in Finland after an airline strike :/ ). Some very well produced videos of the proceedings, including our Making Elephants Dream presentation, are available on Google Video and BitTorrent, with hopefully more to come soon.

The day after the conference, Bassam and I shot over to Antwerp in Belgium to teach a 4 day Blender Workshop at the HISK, a high-end fine arts college located in a gorgeously run-down old military hospital. I was a little uncertain at first, not knowing much about the expectations and abilities of the students, including an audio installation artist, painter, sculptor, and others, none of whom had done any 3D before. By the end of the workshop though, things were going very well. We wanted to give the students more breadth of tuition than depth, so even if they weren’t instant experts, they would know what possibilities exist in Blender for them to integrate with their work, and they managed to keep up very well with the huge amount of information that was given to them day after day. By the end, most of the students were quite comfortable in getting around and starting to use it for practical work in their projects, one of them already connecting up the game engine with his audio applications based on a Python script we found on the web. So all in all, very successful and seemingly fun for everyone.

Immediately after the last session on the last day, we went out for a quick dinner, then Bassam and I jumped back on the train to Amsterdam. In the remaining day before we left, we hung out with Ton and researched and brainstormed improving Blender’s walkcycle animation tools. The results are impressive already! Bassam headed back to the US, and I set off for home, but rather than doing the whole 20+ hour flight in one go, had arranged to stop over in Tokyo overnight. With only about 4 hours to spare, I went strolling around Harajuku, Aoyama and Shibuya, dropping in at a few interesting places around the area.

Anyway, on the flight home, I did some experiments in the Blender Outliner, partially inspired by the expectations and real-world usability testing of the HISK students. Click below to see a little work in progress teaser video of the sort of thing that I’m getting at. The drag and drop stuff might take some time before it gets in a state ready to be committed to CVS, though. There are some structural issues in other areas of the code (that I’m not too confident with) that should probably be dealt with first.